The Comedy of Hamlet
by avesjohn
Summary: Hamlet done for comedy.
1. Act 1, Scene 1

On a pleasant summer night in Miami, a lone policeman, handsomely dressed in his blue uniform and ready for a snack, pulled in to the nearest doughnut shop for a snack halfway through his shift. Before even reaching the counter to ask for it, the goateed black man received what he'd been about to order—a large pink cardboard box filled with O-shaped doughy sweets that might lead to diabetes some years down the line if this man wasn't so damn _sexy_. Barnardo had never come to this shop before, but the boys in blue had certain consistencies about them such that no doughnut shop owner within the county could get a sales permit without first reading and signing a document ensuring their understanding of the law's tastes. He smiled and took the box, and was just about to unlock his car to drive to the next call—something about a white guy—but stopped when he realized he'd parked next to another officer. "Who's there?" he said, walking towards the neighboring vehicle's window.

"Nay, answer me," the occupant sitting in the driver's seat said. "Stand and unfold yourself." Barnardo looked into the passenger window and laughed at the site of the _sexy_ mustached Mexican officer pigging out on his own box of goodies, albeit one nearly empty by now.

"Long live the King!" Barnardo said, as he and his pal Francisco looked at the Doughnut King sign hanging over the building they'd recently exited. Have it your way.

"Barnardo," Francisco said.

"He," Barnardo replied, opening the passenger door to sit in its namesake seat beside Francisco.

"You come most carefully upon your hour," Francisco said as he offered Barnardo an apple fritter, which he accepted because no cop _ever_ refused a doughnut. It was a second currency to them, which also meant it was just as popular with drug smugglers as cocaine and heroin, but worse: therein lied the perfect bribe, the making of corrupt officials on the force.

"'Tis now struck twelve," Barnardo replied, pointing to the digital clock on the dashboard, whose turquoise lights switched from 11:59 PM to 12:00 AM right on cue. "Get thee to bed, Francisco."

"For this relief much thanks." He chewed on a cinnamon roll, which by the looks of it had been left untouched without protection for hours, and was starting to grow stale and moldy. "'Tis bitter cold," Francisco said, almost tearing up at the words, and he set the neglected doughnut down back into its box feeling foolish and shameful. "And I am sick at heart."

"Have you had quiet guard?" Barnardo asked as he placed a comforting hand on Francisco's shoulder. With his other, he reached into his fresh box and handed the friend a likewise cinnamon roll, which was of course taken.

"Not a mouse stirring," and you can bet the rats were placed in the mafia with care, in the hopes that a legal case soon would be there. Francisco bit into the cinnamon roll and nodded at Barnardo to thank him.

"Well, good night." Barnardo left Francisco's car for his own. After turning on the ignition but before driving off, he informed the other officer, "If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, the rivals of my watch, bid them make haste."

Suddenly, sirens stunned the two men. "I think I hear them," Francisco said, watching the impending action through his rearview mirror. He and Barnardo jumped as a third police car, perhaps more aptly referred to as a _mother-effin' Humvee_, crashed at high speed into the parking space beside them, on the other side of Francisco's car. "_Stand ho!_" Francisco shouted to the two _sexy_ white men in the neighboring vehicle, an order that caused a _sexy_ prostitute smoking a joint on the alleyway floor to make like a customer's manhood and erect herself. "_Who is there?_"

In epic slow-motion badass-ness, a red-haired man in a black coat and inexplicable sunglasses at night stepped out of the driver's seat, slowly turned to the inferior officers and removed the aforementioned sunglasses to say, "Friends…" and that was it before he put the sunglasses back on and finished, "…to this ground."

The name's Caine. Horatio Caine. And don't you forget it.

"And like, liegeman to the Dane," my partner in proverbial crime, Marcellus, said in a voice familiar to anyone who listens to _American Top 40 _radio, his faithful Great Dane at his side, a dog ready to solve mysteries even in light of a serious addiction to the eighteenth letter of the English alphabet that rivaled that of pirates.

"Give you good night," Francisco said, tipping his hat to the rest of us.

"O farewell, honest cop," Marcellus replied. "Like, who hath relieved you?"

"Barnardo hath my place," Francisco explained, pointing to said doughnut-inhaling officer. "Give you good night," he repeated, driving back home to see his family, foolishly staying between the lines on the road instead of running over the druggies snorting those lines like any truly badass cop with decent car insurance would do.

"Like, _holla_, Barnardo!" Marcellus said, his embarrassing attempt at crossing ethnic boundaries redeemed somewhat by the kindness inherent in his lifting a hand to give his co-worker a high-five.

"Say _what_?" Barnardo replied, though it was hard to tell if that was sarcasm or genuine urban dialect. "Is Horatio there?" Perhaps my badass sexiness was too much for his virgin eyes. Such denial is not uncommon.

Taking off my glasses, I said, "A piece…" and then put them back on and concluded, "of him."

"Welcome, Horatio," Barnardo said. "Welcome, good Marcellus."

"What," I said, taking off my glasses again, "has this thing appeared again tonight?"

"I have seen nothing," Barnardo replied with a shrug. After hearing that, I bitch-slapped him, because I can.

"Like, Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy and will not let belief take hold of him touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us," Marcellus explained to a pink-cheeked Barnardo. "Therefore I have entreated him along with us to watch the minutes of this night, that, like, if again this apparition come, he may approve our eyes and speak it." That's right: it's not real unless _I_ say it is, and after confirming its existence, only _I _can speak to it. Jesus, I am so badass.

"Tush, tush," I said, putting my sunglasses back on again, "'twill not appear."

"Sit down awhile," Barnardo suggested, "and let us once again assail your ears, that are so fortified against our story, what we have two night seen."

I put my sunglasses back on, leaned against the _mother-effin' Humvee_, and prepared to hear Barnardo's account of the thing that a careful reader will have noticed has not yet been formally described. With a doubtful sigh, I remarked, "Well, sit we down, and let us hear Barnardo speak of this."

"Last night of all," Barnardo began, pointing towards the night sky above us, "when yond same star that's westward from the pole had made his course t' illume that part of heaven where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, the bell then beating one…"

At that moment, we suddenly got a call on the radio inside our vehicles. "_Car 54, where are you?_" the woman on the other line asked.

"Some forty-odd years past your sixties television references, ma'am," I said, speaking into my badass car radio. "What be the issue at hand?"

"A ghost has been sighted at the cemetery," she said, without the specifics of a good dispatcher, but we didn't care. Her voice was too _sexy_ for us to care about what she said. Regardless, she went into the specifics in her next sentence. "The ghost of—"

"_Say no more_," I said quickly throwing the radio back into the _mother-effin' Humvee_ and giving my subordinate colleagues the signal to follow me to the aforementioned cemetery.

After having our otherwise boring three-minute drive to the cemetery made more exciting by interesting camera angles, an electronic soundtrack cut-and-paste from a previous episode, and the simple fact that we were bitchin' characters in pimped-out rides, we arrived at the crime scene to investigate and attract a wide fanbase in the process. As promised, there await the ghost of none other than I'm not spoiling shit.

"_Zoiks!_ Like, thou art a scholar," Marcellus said to me, putting his hand on my shoulder as though I needed the comfort. "Speak to it, Horatio."

"Look he not like the King?" Barnardo added. "Mark it, Horatio."

"Most like," I nodded. "It harrows me…" I said, taking of my glasses again, "with fear and wonder." It didn't—_nothing_ scares me—but I was just being a good friend and co-worker, giving sympathy to the other two men.

"It would be spoke to."

"_Speak to it, Horatio_," Marcellus quietly pleaded.

I lifted one arm, signaling Barnardo and Marcellus to give the spirit and I room to converse. This could get ugly, and although such a thing is _impossible_ in Miami as far as physical features go, as a situation it happens quite often; on a regular basis, in fact, downright weekly. And you, too, can join in on my _sexy, badass team_ and I _every Sunday night _at_ 10:00 PM_ (9:00 PM Central)on _CBS_.

"What art thou that usurp'st this time of night, together with that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Dade County did sometimes march?" I asked, putting my shades back on. "I charge thee, speak."

"Like, it is offended," Marcellus observed, as the ghost proceeded to flip us off and grab his transparent crotch with the other hand.

"See, it stalks away," Barnardo said, as the ghost proceeded to stalk away. Nothing escapes these men.

"Stay! Speak! Speak!" I demanded. I pulled my sunglasses back off, thinking that perhaps my wearing them was making me so badass I was scaring the ghost away, and then I continued, "I charge thee, speak!"

Alas, no use. The ghost disappeared into the cold wind of the night, and with that, I sighed and put my sunglasses back on. As you can imagine, I've had a lot of practice when it comes to forearm movement. And for those of you who dare to interpret that as a double entendre (and for those of you who don't get it: _masturbation_), let me just remind you all that someone as _sexy_ and badass as me doesn't _need_ to self-serve, and I _never_ had to. The women came to _me_, and only _then_ did I come onto them. And yes, _that_ was a double entendre. If you find that offensive and not the spectacle of violence to follow, then welcome to America, my friend.

"'Like, 'tis gone and will not speak," Marcellus said.

"How now, Horatio, you tremble and look pale," Barnardo remarked. He must have assumed that my appearance was the ghost's doing, having completely forgotten that I was a ginger, albeit an unusually _sexy_ ginger. As for the trembling, well, _ha_, no way. "Is not this something more than fantasy? What think you on it?"

"Before my God," I said, looking straight up at the full moon above us and putting my hands on my hips, "I might not this believe…" (I reached into my coat pocket and put my sunglasses back on) "without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes."

"Is it not like the King?" Marcellus asked, trembling with fear.

"As thou art to thyself," I replied. "Such was the very armor he had on when he the ambitious Cuba combated. So frowned he once when, in an angry parle, he smote the surfing Cubans on the water." People familiar with the original text of the play are now thinking the same thing I was: "'Tis strange." But you try telling me windsurfing Cubans with guns doesn't make for a ridiculously awesome action scene. That's right, you can't.

"Thus twice before," Marcellus said, "and jump at this dead hour, with, like, martial stalk hath he gone by our watch."

"In what particular thought to work I know not, but in the gross and scope of mine opinion this bodes some strange eruption to our state."

Who you gonna call?

"Good now, like, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, why this same strict and most observant watch so nightly toils the subject of the land, and why such daily cast of brazen cannon and foreign mart for implements of war, like, why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task does not divide the Sunday from the week." You have no idea what Marcellus just said, do you? "Like, what might be toward that this sweaty haste doth make the night join laborer with the day? Who is 't that can inform me?"

"_Yo,_" I said with a simple raise of my right hand.

I then went into exposition that was so effective in making the unknowing young officers understand the past, that we were literally transported into the battle between the trigger-happy windsurfing Cubans, led by the Bearded One, Fortinbras Castro, and the trigger-happier parasailing Americans, led by the Ghostly One, King Hamlet, whom we referred to as "King" even though he was actually a "Mayor" because we thought it would be fun making the Queen think she has to actually come down here every time she's on a goodwill tour. This little practical joke worked out so well that Miami, Florida, is now its own little _de facto_ monarchy. And we totally kicked Cuba's ass.

"And this, I take it," I said as we were dropped off back in the present day, "is the main motive of our preparations, the source of this our watch, and the chief head of this posthaste and rummage in the land."

Barnardo and Marcellus exchanged glances, and then the former nodded and said: "I think it be no other but e'en so. Well may it sort that this portentous figure comes armed through our watch so like the king that was and is the question of these wars."

"A mote it is to trouble the mind's eye." One as badass as I was naturally keen to the foreshadowing we were witnessing this night. "In the most high and palmy state of Rome," I noted, showing them the lack of hair on my palms, "a little ere the mightiest Julius fell, the graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets…" I paused here to let those images soak into my companion's minds; after the inexplicable time travel we'd just been put through, this proved a harder task than usual, though it was nothing compared to the frustration high school kids reading this story were having. "As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters of the sun," I continued, stumping even the scholars at this point, "and the moist star, upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands," I said as the three of us looked up at the moon, and a distant siren drew ever closer, "was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. And even the like precurse of feared events, as harbringers preceding still the fates and prologue to the omen coming on, have heaven and earth together demonstrated unto our climatures and countrymen."

Before I could go on, the source of the loud siren revealed itself to be a white 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor with several enhancements and added product placement in the form of a logo, a white ghost stamped out by a red circle with a cross through it, plastered on several of the doors. The vehicle parked beside our Hummer at the entrance to the cemetery, and four men, one of them black by politically correct obligation, stepped out, all dressed in the same gray outfits with what appeared to be a cumbersome machine of some sort strapped to each of their backs.

"We got a call about a ghost?" the first one said.

"Like, who are you?" Marcellus said.

"Ghostbusters," the second man said.

"What's that mean?" Barnardo said.

"We bust ghosts," the third man said. "Who are you?"

"We're with the crime lab," I said, placing my hands on my hips again. "CSI. Miami. You might have heard of us."

The first man shook his head. "Egon," he told the third, bespectacled man, "what you got?"

When we looked next, Egon had a strange device in his hand, with a computerized display in the center and two wing-like additions with flashing yellow-green lights on either side, which were moving up and down as the device changed position. "The PKE meter is showing a strong concentration of psycho-kinetic energy in this area. Then again, we _are_ in a cemetery, Venkman."

"Guys," the second man said. He was just staring up at the sky behind my team and I. "I don't think we need that anymore."

We turned around, and collectively let out a gasp at the sight of the returned ghost.

"But soft, behold!" I said. "Lo, where it comes again!"

"What?" the fourth man, silent until now but black since he'd arrived, said, but I ignored him. He turned to the other three and asked, "What did he say?"

"I'll cross it though it blast me," I said, signaling everyone else to step back.

"_Don't!_" the second ghostbuster cried.

"_Stay, illusion!_"

The ghostbuster slapped his forehead, and Venkman patted him on the back. "It's okay, Ray. He's a ginger. No one will miss him."

As the ghost descended through the air, it opened its arms as if to hug me.

"Proton packs ready?" Ray said, signaling his comrades to pull out a weapon attached the main devices on their backs by a strong black cord. While they aimed those weapons at the ghost of King Hamlet, Ray warned: "Don't antagonize it, Mr…"

"You know my name," I said bluntly, taking my glasses off to help them remember.

"Actually…"

"If thou hast any sound or use of voice," I told the ghost, who continued to descend at an increasingly slow pace, after I put my glasses back on, "speak to me." Though willing to do ghastly things to me, the sluggish movement of the king's spirit made it more than obvious that even in death, there were some things that were still feared, and I was one of those things. "If there be any good thing to be done that may to thee do ease and grace to me, speak to me." Still it said nothing. "If thou art privy to thy country's fate, which happily foreknowing may avoid, O, speak!"

"I _really_ don't think you're going to get through to it, man," the black ghostbuster said. His name is actually Winston, but no character ever says his name in conversation here, which leaves us with no "natural" way to introduce him to you (and resulting in this abrupt interruption of the dramatic tension), but on the bright side, here's an A+ on your math test.

"Or," I persisted, lifting my index finger, a simple feat that even seemed to make the ghost quiver, "if thou hast uphoarded in thy life extorted treasure in the womb of earth, for which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, speak of it." Now I was just being a greedy bastard, but come on, do you honestly think the level of one's badass is directly proportional to their salary? Besides, I had illegitimate children to feed. I assume.

Like any hider of treasure, the ghost wanted to make us seek for it, and so it vomited green slime all over us and began flying away. "_Stay and speak!_" I demanded of the apparition. Turning to my partner, I pointed backwards and said, "Stop it, Marcellus."

Marcellus looked at me, and then he looked at his pistol and asked, "Like, shall I strike it with my partisan?" A word that was totally _not_ synonymous with gun.

"Do, if it will not stand," I answered condescendingly.

"'Tis here," Barnardo said.

"'Tis here," I echoed.

Then we heard a farting sound, and the ghost vanished into thin air.

"'Tis gone," Marcellus said, having _not_ struck it with the partisan he didn't have.

"_Ruh-roh_," his Great Dane added.

"Like, we do it wrong," Marcellus reasoned, "being so majestical, to offer it a show of violence, for it is as the air, invulnerable, and our vain blows malicious mockery."

"It was about to speak when the cheese was cut," Barnardo added. Then he gasped (likely for breath), and was reminded sternly that he who smelt it, dealt it.

"And then it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons," I said, and Marcellus nodded in agreement. "I have heard the cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, doth with his lofty and thrill-sounding throat awake the god of day, and at his warning, whether in sea or in fire, in earth or air, th' extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine, and of the truth herein this present object made probation."

"No," Barnardo said. He looked at Marcellus and I as though we were a pair of dudes obsessed with cocks. Bitch, please. "It left because someone farted."

"_It faded on the crowing of the cock,_" Marcellus said, bitch-slapping Barnardo because I said he could. "Like, some say that ever 'gainst that season comes wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated, this bird of dawning singeth all night long; and then, they say, like, no spirit dare stir abroad, the nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, no fairy takes, like, nor witch hath power to charm, so hallowed and gracious is that time."

"So have I heard and do in part believe it," I said, taking my glasses off. "But look, the morn in russet mantle clad walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill." Of course, the only reason there's a hill there is because this isn't actually being filmed in Miami, Florida, but in Long Beach, California. "Break we our watch up, and by advice let us impart what we have seen tonight unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him. Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it as needful in our loves, fitting our duty?"

"Like, let's do 't," Marcellus said, slapping me a high-five while all four ghostbusters bitch-slapped Barnardo because they were feeling left out, "I pray, and I this morning know where we shall find him most convenient."

"So I guess you could say," I said as I put my sunglasses back on, "we won't get fooled again."

Somewhere in the distance, Roger Daltrey screamed and the guitar kicked in.


	2. Act 1, Scene 2

The newly appointed _sexy _"King" Claudius sat before his subjects at the dinner table in his summer home in the Bahamas, with _sexy_ wife Gertrude at his side. The two were as happily in love as any recently widowed middle-aged woman and her power-hungry former brother-in-law would be. His black beard and the scar over his right eye, as well as the pet hyenas that ate babies and the Nazi iconography his decorators were using for purely aesthetic reasons on his furniture and walls, contrasted sharply with the warm blue eyes and beautiful flaxen hair of his new wife, in that distinctly wrong kind of way.

"Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death the memory be green," Claudius wept as he cut up an onion, while an autographed poster of Adolf Hitler was being raised on the wall behind him, "and that is us befitted to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe, yet so far hath discretion fought with nature that we with wisest sorrow think on him together with remembrance of ourselves." He bit into the steak he was now able to afford thanks to his being ridiculously rich courtesy of what his brother had left in his will to Gertrude, and smiled as his body swallowed and prepared to digest the power. Also, as royalty, he was using the royal "we" (meaning "I") here. That's the important thing.

"Therefore," he said as he took Gertrude's hand in his own, "our sometime sister," meaning sister-_in-law_, not that it made him any less of a dick, "now our queen," even though she already was, "th' imperial jointress to this warlike state, have we (as 'twere a defeated joy, with an auspicious and a dropping eye, with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, in equal scale weighing delight and dole) taken to wife." And it really was a beautiful wedding, although it was somewhat marred by the fact that a dozen children were being raped and brutally murdered and their remains fed to pigs across the street, with their murderer never to see justice because he committed suicide right after, the gunshot blow to his head totally ruining the first dance for the bridge and groom. But that cake, my god, it was delicious!

"Nor have we herein barred your better wisdoms, which have freely gone with this affair along," Claudius continued. He and Gertrude gave each other a peck on the check, then he resumed speaking to his guests: "For all, our thanks." Their wedding gifts, ranging from silverware to jewelry to the blueprints for the largest concentration camp to ever be built by the people to be killed inside it, were all piled under last year's Christmas tree, which was dying slowly because Claudius liked to watch them suffer. "Young Fortinbras, holding a weak supposal of our worth or thinking by our late dear brother's death our state to be disjoint and out of frame, colleagued with this dream of his advantage, he hath not failed to pester us with a message importing the surrender of those lands lost by his father, with all bonds of law, to our most valiant brother—so much for him."

Almost everyone laughed at this mockery of the Communist enemy, and those that didn't suddenly found a rifle pointed at their heads and a threatening reminder of who was the boss now. Even though the only reason they didn't laugh was because this was the twenty-first century, dude, I mean, I had no idea what the hell he was saying, because, really, who talks like that anymore? Despite laughing after being given a modern English translation, they were still slapped in the face with the butt of the rifles as a warning, and as the blood dripped from their bruised noses onto their plates, they were at least able to take comfort in knowing that the worst was yet to come.

Continuing his boastful speech, Claudius said: "Now for ourself and for this time of meeting. This much the business is: we have here writ to Cuba, uncle of young Fortinbras, who, impotent and bedrid, scarcely hears of his nephew's purpose, to suppress his further gait herein, in that the levies, the lists, and full proportions are all made out of his subject; and we here dispatch you, good Cornelius, and you, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, for bearers of this greeting to old Cuba, giving you no further personal power to business with the King more than the scope of these dilated articles allow." He handed this letter to the aforementioned pair of subjects: Cornelius, a talking chimpanzee from the future, and Voltemand, who was always being mistaken for Voldemort and as a result found himself being unfairly blamed for wizard genocides, which means he frustratingly could never get season tickets for the Heat. "Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty."

Speaking in unison, Cornelius and Voltemand answered, "In that and all things we will show our duty."

"We doubt it nothing," Claudius said. "Heartily farewell," he said, waving goodbye to the two of them as they high-tailed out of the place on Voltemand's flying broom. With that done, Claudius turned to the _sexy_ young man sitting at his left. "And now, Laertes, what's the news with you?"

"I went shopping at Men's Wearhouse the other day," the well-dressed twenty-something remarked with a nod. Chewing on some peas, he added, "_Mmm_. Good peas."

"You told us of some suit. What is 't, Laertes?"

"It's a Jones New York."

Everyone at the table did a golf clap.

"Very good," Claudius said, patting Laertes on the back. "Very good."

"Thank you, thank you," Laertes smiled, acknowledging the King's subjects with a wave of his hand. "I _do_ like the way I look."

"You cannot speak of reason to the Dade and lose your voice," Claudius said. "What wouldst thou beg, Laertes, that shall not be my offer, not thy asking? The head is not more native to the heart, the hand more instrumental to the mouth, than is the throne of Dade County to thy father. What wouldst thou have, Laertes?"

"My dread lord," Laertes said, "your leave and favor to return to France, from whence though willingly I came to Dade County to show my duty in your coronation, yet now I must confess, that duty done, my thoughts and wishes bend again toward France and bow them to your gracious leave and pardon."

"Have you your father's leave? What says Polonius?"

Everyone at the table turned to the graying Polonius, who was Laertes' _sexy_ father. In addition to being a father in the literal sense (as in, he got busy with a woman who then shot out some offspring), he was also a father in the figurative sense (as in, while he was getting busy he asked said woman who her daddy was, and she said that he was), to many an officer on the Miami-Dade Police Department, of which Polonius was the captain. We all called him Captain Obvious, because that was his last name and it's only polite to address him in such a manner.

"Hath, my lord," Polonius explained, "wrung from me my slow leave by laborsome petition, and at last upon his will I sealed my hard consent. I do beseech you give him leave to go."

"_Sweet!_" Laertes said. He jumped onto the table, kicked his plate in the direction of a Nazi goon's face, and did a gyrating striptease in celebration of his return to the University of Paris. As you might have guessed, he was studying abroad, which is to say that he was blowing thousands of dollars just to ogle his sexy French classmates. I, for one, can think of no better way to spend one's time as a student. Also, you'll notice he was majoring in ass kissing.

"Take thy fair hour, Laertes," Claudius said. "Time be thine, and thy best graces spend it at thy will." He, and thus the rest of the table, then turned to Hamlet, whom you had no idea was here until just now. "But now, my cousin Hamlet and my son, how is it that the clouds still hang on you?"

"A little more than kin and less than kind," Hamlet said quietly to himself. Leaning against the wall like the impolite _sexy_ rebel that he was, the young Prince was dressed in a bright tie-dye T-shirt splashed with neon purple and lime, with a pair of ZZ Top-certified cheap sunglasses over his eyes, a backwards Dolphins baseball cap over his frazzled blond hair, and a pair of sandals on his feet below the swim trunks covering the top half of his legs. "Not so, my lord," he replied to his uncle's question. "I am too much in the sun." And in a happier story, skin cancer would have been his undoing.

Gertrude turned to her son and suggested the following suggestively: "Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, and let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark." As ordered, Hamlet removed his sunglasses (with none of the flair _I_ would have had), and looked back at his mother as if waiting for her to order the removal of more articles of attire. "Do not forever with thy vailed lids seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity."

"Ay, madam, it is common."

"If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?"

"'Seems,' madam?" Hamlet said. "Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected havior of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly. These indeed 'seem,' for they are actions that a man might play; but I that have within which passes show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe."

It was beautiful language, indeed, but it didn't make an ounce of sense—screw your metric system, this is _America_, damn it—in this adaptation of the story, where our hero's choice of clothing does not even remotely recall that of a brooding vampire cursed with a soul who's fallen in love with the Slayer.

"'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet," Claudius said, "to give these mourning duties to your father, but you must know your father lost a father, that father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound in filial obligation for some term to do obsequious sorrow." Except death is cheap here in Miami, as evidenced by the big fat paycheck I get every week for saving your sorry asses through the power of bad science. "But to persever in obstinate condolement is a course of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief." Claudius emphasized just how unmanly this grief was by handing his nephew the card of Gertrude's gynecologist. This infuriated Hamlet, who had always wondered why she let some nobody doctor touch her down there but not her own son. As Hamlet crumbled the card in his hand, he looked past a naked Laertes still dancing on the table at Claudius, who continued: "It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, a heart unfortified, a mind impatient, an understanding simple and unschooled." Hamlet flipped Claudius the bird and stuck his tongue out. In response, Claudius grabbed his crotch and had his goons aim their rifles at Hamlet, who surrendered promptly. "For what we know must be and is as common as any the most vulgar thing to sense," Claudius resumed without acknowledging this brief scuffle, "why should we in our peevish opposition take it to heart?"

One thug raised his hand, and Claudius pointed to him as a signal to speak. "Because you killed him, dude." A second later, the man was dead from an accidental rifle discharge that traveled straight through his head and that was in no way precipitated by any subtle hand movements from the new king trying to keep his nonexistent conspiracy under wraps.

"Fie," Claudius said as the body was carried away, "'tis a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, a fault to nature, to reason most absurd, whose common theme is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, from the first corse till he that died today, 'This must be so.' We pray you, throw to earth this unprevailing woe and think of us as of a father; for let the world take note, you are the most immediate to our throne, and with no less nobility of love than that which dearest father bears his son do I impart towards you."

Hamlet thought about this for a second while Laertes did a decreasingly revealing dress-tease, having by now run out of clothes to strip. He wouldn't live to see it catch on at non-alcoholic bars outside churches and schools worldwide. Finally, after watching Laertes zip up his pants, Hamlet asked, "Was he telling the truth, Uncle Claudius?"

A tense silence, punctuated only by the sound of chirping crickets that one suspects are practically hired specifically for such occasions, reverberated through the room. The goons dressed in stormtrooper outfits readied their weapons for fire, Claudius tightened his grip on Gertrude's hand, and we're only halfway through the second scene, so everyone seriously needs to chill ax.

Looking at the now fully dressed Laertes who was climbing off the table, Hamlet chilled the axes at last when he said, "Is his suit really a Jones New York?"

Someone fired their gun anyway, at that prick from accounting, and soon everyone except our contractually immune main characters was dead from the ensuing violence.

"Well," Laertes replied as he wiped some blood, or maybe it was ketchup, you can never be sure about these things, from his shirt, "since you asked, Hamlet…it is."

"You son of a _bitch_!" Hamlet said, grabbing the rifle from the bloody hands of the nearest corpse and screaming in madness as he cocked and aimed the gun at Laertes' chest. "_I want one!_"

"_Hamlet!_" Claudius said, arising from the protection the underside of the table afforded him and his new wife. Holding his hands in the air, he assured the short-tempered fellow that, "You're a _prince_! You can have whatever you like!"

"What?"

"I said, you can have whatever you like!"

"Stacks on deck?" Hamlet asked.

Claudius nodded.

"Patron on ice?"

Claudius gave him a thumbs-up.

"Can we pop bottles all night?"

"We can," Claudius smiled.

Hamlet made a slight glance towards his mother, who was following her spouse in creeping out from under the table, and remarked to her, "Late night sex, it's so wet, it's so tight."

"Say hi to Ophelia for me," Gertrude said.

"That's my _sister_!" Laertes said.

"And she's _sexy_," Hamlet added, which just saved me like, an entire word for when I give her forthcoming description. "Like my mom."

"That's your _mom_!" Laertes said.

"So," Hamlet said, throwing the gun to the floor as he continued conversation with Claudius, "I can really have whatever I like?"

"Sure thing, son."

"_Anything?_"

"Anything."

"Can I go back to school in Wittenberg, Germany?"

"No."

Hamlet picked the rifle he'd threatened Laertes with back up and tried to shoot his uncle with it, only to discover that all the rounds had been emptied in the previously mentioned carnage. "Damn."

"Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet," Gertrude said. "I pray thee, stay with us." She lifted her dress a little to show some leg. "Go not to Wittenberg, Germany."

Hamlet saw this leg and said, "I shall in my best obey you, madam."

"Why, 'tis a loving and fair reply," Claudius said, patting Gertrude on the back and pulling Hamlet, Polonius, and Laertes along as the five of them made their way out of the room that the janitor was going to have to require one hell of a raise before being convinced to clean it up. "Be as ourself in Dade County." After stepping into the next room, where I was waiting with Barnardo and Marcellus, Hamlet remained while the other four left. "Madam, come," Claudius continued. "This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet sits smiling to my heart, in grace whereof no jocund health that Hamlet drinks today but the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, and the King's rouse the heaven shall bruit again, respeaking earthly thunder. Come away."

As soon as Hamlet (thought) he was alone, he broke into tears that would make even the most stoic of men laugh, and laugh we did in plain but nevertheless unnoticed sight of our comrade. "O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter!" Upon hearing this remark, Barnardo broke the nearest window with his elbow and tossed Hamlet a piece of broken glass to cut himself with if he so desired. Studying his right arm to determine where best to cut (fool, the leftie was using a right-handed shard!), he added, "O God, God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!" He made an incision into his flesh, and Marcellus cheered him on. "Fie on 't, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross possess it merely."

Hamlet looked to the wall behind him and saw a poster advertising the so-called election of Claudius to the throne; after blowing his nose on it, and then crying in more agony at the bloody paper cut that resulted, he continued, "That it should come to this: but two months dead—nay, not so much, not two." He read the ad out loud ("_Free cookies for anyone who reads this ad out loud!_"), and after eating the delicious cookies, he wept some more. "So excellent a king, that was this Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face so roughly. Heaven and earth, must I remember?" ("Damn straight," Barnardo said.) "Why, she would hang on him as if increase if appetite had grown by what it fed on. And yet, within a month (let me not think on 't; frailty, thy name is woman!), a little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor father's body."

"What is it with women and shoes, anyway?" I asked Barnardo and Marcellus, who both shrugged, after taking my glasses off. As I put them right back on again, I remarked, "Maybe they wouldn't be so frail if they weren't walking in heels all the time."

"_Like Niobe, all tears_," Hamlet continued loudly, perhaps actually aware of our snarky presence, "why she, even she (o God, a beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer!), married with my uncle, my father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules." Hamlet took a small breath, which anyone in a dictatorial regime—not that this was one, I'm just saying, you know, for example—knows to do frequently, since the next one could just as easily be your last. And speaking of which: "Within a month, ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her galled eyes, she married. O, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But break, my heart," he said as he placed his fists on his chest far too dramatically for the first act, "for I must hold my tongue."

"Like, you couldn't have realized that _before_ you made a long-ass speech?" Marcellus said.

"Marcellus?" Hamlet said. "Barnardo? Horatio? How long have you been here?"

"How do you think that piece of broken glass got into your hand, man?" Marcellus said, pointing at the shard and the self-mutilation it had caused.

"My what?"

Hamlet looked down, saw the red liquid dripping down his arm and onto his clothes, and hurried into another room to find a towel, while the rest of us laughed at his emotional turmoil and the dinosaur-shaped puddle the blood had left on the floor on his way out.

Upon Hamlet's return a minute later, with a white cloth towel wrapped around his arm, I opened my arms to hug him. "Hail to your lordship," I smiled while removing the sunglasses with one hand.

"I am glad to see you well," Hamlet said as we shared a hug. "Horatio—or I do forget myself?"

"The same, my lord," I said as I wiped my glasses on the one white spot left on his improvised cast before returning them to their proper location over my eyes, "and your poor servant ever."

"Sir, my good friend," Hamlet insisted. "I'll change that name with you. And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio? Marcellus?" He wondered what I was doing away from the university in Wittenberg where I had been studying, which could only mean Oedipus had made things so complicated within this boy's head that he'd forgotten I'd already graduated with a BS in criminal justice and a minor in the court system because I'd arrested her daddy. Then again, Gertrude can be quite alluring on a good day.

"My good lord," Marcellus said, nodding.

"I am very glad to see you." He looked to Barnardo, who wouldn't have any more lines for the remainder of the scene, and said, "Good even, sir." Realizing he was wasting everyone's time with these pleasantries, he returned his attention towards me and asked, "But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?"

"A truant disposition," I answered, removing the glasses again, "good my lord."

"I would not hear your enemy say so," Hamlet said, "nor shall you do my ear that violence to make it truster of your own report against yourself." Put in simpler terms, "I know you are no truant." Suddenly questioning his sexuality upon taking in the awesome scope of my masculinity, he remembered one of the many issues this had caused in the past. "But what of your affair in Elsinore?" I shook my head. "We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart." Hey, I'm always ready to booze up when my so-called friends remind me of awful memories I thought I'd managed to rid myself of.

"My lord," I said, putting my sunglasses back on, "I came to see your father's funeral."

"I prithee," Hamlet said, "do not mock me, fellow student." So I laughed in my head.

"Graduate," I corrected him, and not just in the Mrs. Robinson sense, either.

"I think it was to see my mother's wedding."

"Indeed, my lord, it followed soon upon."

"Thrift, thrift, Horatio." I looked around for signs indicating a sale, but found none. "The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." Barnardo and Marcellus joined me in searching for the food of which Hamlet spoke, while the speaker continued speaking. "Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven or ever I had seen that day, Horatio! My father—methinks I see my father."

"Where, my lord?" I inquired, currently lifting the nearest woman's skirt. I found a muffin, but now was not the time to be eating it. "Where's the food?"

"In my mind's eye, Horatio."

"You bastard!" Barnardo said.

"Like, you deserve whatever tragedy befalls you, man!" Marcellus said, his Great Dane helping get the message across by growling.

"I was talking about my dad, you guys."

"_Zoiks!_" Marcellus gasped. "Like, Hamlet's a cannibal!" And with that, he and his dog ran in the air for a few seconds before disappearing in a cloud a dust.

"I saw him once," I shrugged, having seen worse things than cannibalism during my watch. "He was a goodly king." I took my glasses off.

"He was a man," Hamlet said, and the fact that he had to remind us of this fact is just depressing, though one could just as easily argue that the legacy of the Hamlet family manhood had recently been cast into doubt, what with guys like me walking around making the young prince with an Oedipus complex look bad by comparison. "Take him for all in all, I shall not upon his like again."

"My lord," I said, putting my sunglasses back on, "I think I saw him yesternight."

"Saw who?"

"My lord, the King your father."

"The King my father?"

"_What are you, a parrot?_" I snapped, taking my sunglasses off once again and adjusting my arm angle carefully for maximum firepower. "We don't got enough of those little green shits flying around, you got to go repeating everything I say?"

"You bastard!" Barnardo said as he and I both glared at Hamlet, and then I threw my glasses at him at such an angle that they flew from my hand to his cornea ("_Ow! Oh god, why?_") before boomeranging back towards me, whereupon they landed perfectly over my eyes. Yeah, bitch, you read that right.

"Season your admiration for a while," I warned my friend as blood spurted from his eye socket onto the floor, "with an attent ear, till I may deliver upon the witness of these gentlemen this marvel to you."

Barnardo and Hamlet looked around with their three working eyes for the other gentleman witness I was speaking of. Marcellus and his Great Dane were gone, no doubt hiding in a closet with some Scooby Snacks.

"For God's love," Hamlet cried, his tears of wanting to know more about his father only exacerbating the tears of losing an eye and thus making him cry and bleed even more, "let me hear!"

"Two nights together had these gentlemen," I began, whilst cueing Barnardo to dim the lights and putting my flashlight under my face for scare value, "Marcellus and Barnardo, on their watch, in the dead waste and middle of the night, been thus encountered: a figure like your father, armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie, appears before them and with solemn march goes slow and stately by them."

Hamlet was shivering and sucking his thumb. Barnardo wrapped a blanket—a red one, for reasons I'm sure you can understand—around him for comfort, but did so with so little warning that the young prince jumped and nearly screamed. "You bastard!" my equally shocked colleague said to the boy, shaking his head as he walked back towards me.

"Thrice he walked by their oppressed and fear-surprised eyes within his truncheon's length," I continued, without bothering to lessen the scare value for him or the pompous literary value for you by defining a "truncheon," "whilst they, distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear, stand dumb and did not speak to him." I bitch-slapped Barnardo for his dumbness because I can and because it would've made Hamlet happy, at least for a moment, to see such punishment doled out. "This to me in dreadful secrecy impart they did, and I with them the third night kept the watch, where, as they had delivered, both in time, form of the thing (each word made true and good), the apparition comes." Finally, to cast out any doubt the traumatized young man might have had, I bitch-slapped Barnardo once more for good measure and added, "I knew your father; these hands," I said as I showed him my hand, red from its bitch-slapping action you know from my action figure, "are not more like."

Marcellus and his dog returned just as I had finished telling the story, with full stomachs and smelling suspiciously of marijuana. "Like, what'd we miss?" Marcellus asked.

"The fact that I'm not a cannibal, for one," Hamlet replied. "Or a parrot," he added while glaring at me as best he could with his one working eye. "But where was this?" he said to me, wanting to get back on track with the plot.

"My lord, upon the platform where we watch," I said.

"Hey," Marcellus said excitedly to Hamlet, "that's where we saw the ghost of your dad, man!"

"Did you not speak to it?" Hamlet asked me, continuing to ignore Marcellus.

"My lord, I did, but answer made it none." I looked to my colleagues and explained, "Yet once methought it lifted up its head and did address itself to motion, like as it would speak; but even then the morning cock crew loud, and at the sound it shrunk in haste away and vanished from our sight."

"Yeah," Barnardo said. "You know, Hamlet, for an undead spirit capable of innumerable things beyond our mere mortal understanding, your dad sure is a pussy."

"'Tis very strange," Hamlet said to me.

"Actually, considering your taste in women," Barnardo said, "it's not really."

"I'm boning _Ophelia_, asshole!"

"But, like, you're thinking about your mom when you do!" Marcellus gasped. "Isn't he?" he asked his pooch, who snickered quite humanly for his species. "See, he thinks so, too, man!"

"And even disregarding that," Barnardo said, "Ophelia may be cute, but she's _crazy_, dude!"

"She is _not_!" Hamlet whined. "You're all just jealous!"

I shook my head and sighed. After I removed my glasses solemnly, I said, "As I do live, my honored lord, it is true." Hamlet burst into suicidal tears again, and so I placed my hand on his shoulder. "And we did think it writ down in our duty to let you know of it."

"Indeed, sirs," Hamlet said as he wiped his tears on the bloody towel covering his arm, "this troubles me."

"Really?" I said. "I hadn't noticed." Okay, so all this bad news about an undead father, a mentally ill girlfriend, and icky love triangle between himself, his mother, and his uncle had just been laid on Hamlet's plate. I decided it was only fair to give him some positive reinforcement. "Hamlet?" I said, causing the prince to look back up at me with a face covered in blood such that it could be mistaken as a racist caricature of Native Americans, but with all the grief of tribal slaughter, foreign disease transfer, and land takeover by European settlers replaced with stuff better suited for a Simple Plan song. "Remember that girlfriend of yours from high school? The one that cheated on you with Barry?" He nodded. "She was our murder victim last week."

Hamlet smiled. "Hold you the watch tonight?" he asked as we all got up off the floor.

"_We do, my lord,_" Barnardo, Marcellus, and I said all together.

"Armed, say you?" he further questioned us.

"_Armed, my lord,_" we replied, pulling our guns out in a flourish I encourage you to try at home if a Darwin Award tickles your fancy.

"From top to toe?"

"_My lord, from head to foot,_" we said to finish up our Three Musketeers-style unity.

"Then saw you not his face?"

"O, yes," I nodded while I holstered my weapon, "he wore his beaver up."

"_Stop talking about my dad like that!_"

"Hamlet, a beaver in this sense isn't—" Barnardo began to explain, before deciding it would be funnier to just let it be. Nevertheless, he simplified it to ruin the joke on your part. "We could see his face."

"What, he looked he frowningly?" Hamlet said.

"Like, he was _dead_," Marcellus said. "What do _you_ think?"

"A countenance more in sorrow than in anger," I clarified.

"Pale or red?"

"Nay, very pale."

"Because he was _dead_," Marcellus added.

"And fixed his eyes upon you?"

"Most constantly," I said, being reminded that I had to cover up my own eyes after leaving them exposed and vulnerable to revealing my inability to act to the world for so long, thus putting the glasses back on when I did.

"I would I had been there," Hamlet moped.

"It would have much amazed you."

"Very like," Hamlet said, and by now you all know that he's going to go see the ghost anyway, so all this knowing tease of dialogue isn't very entertaining. "Stayed it long?"

"While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred."

"Longer, longer," Marcellus and Barnardo argued.

"Not when _I_ saw 't," I said, shocked by their lengthy, privileged views of the thing. I could totally fire them for that.

"His beard was grizzled, too?" Hamlet continued prying for description.

"It was as I have seen it in his life," I said, "a sable silvered."

Hamlet nodded. "I will watch tonight. Perchance 'twill walk again."

"I warrant it will."

"If it assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape and bid me hold my peace." First the man defies God by attempting suicide, now he's going to defy Satan by talking to the ghost of his father. Clearly, Hamlet has a death wish. "I pray you all, if you have hitherto concealed this sight, let it be tenable in your silence still; and whatsoever else shall hap tonight, give it an understanding but no tongue." Well, there goes any chance of me getting some action tonight. "I will requite your loves." Barnardo gasped. "No, not in that way," he assured us of his straightness. "So fare you well," he said while bidding us ado. "Upon the platform, 'twixt eleven and twelve, I'll visit you."

"_Our duty to your Honor,_" our trio waved goodbye, leaving Hamlet alone in the room to bitch.

"Your loves, as mine to you. Farewell." Certain that he was alone once more, he then said, in tears, of course, "My father's spirit—in arms! All is not well. I doubt some foul play," he said ironically, since that's totally what was up in this crime-ridden hellhole of a Caribbean paradise. Oh, that's right, we're not in Miami right now, we're still in the Bahamas. I apologize, Bahamians. Your many bikinied women do please the eye so. "Would the night were come!" It was already here, but I digress. "Till then, sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes."

And now, a word from our sponsors!


	3. Act 1, Scene 3

I hope you will seriously consider purchasing what was advertised in the interim between the previous scene and this next one, because it sure as hell isn't the quality storytelling that keeps us on the air.

"But Horatio," you might be saying to yourself because I'm fictional you idiot, "this is _Hamlet_, the magnum opus of English literature, and Mr. Jacobs wouldn't like you talking about the Bard's greatest work in such a manner. _Mmm_…Mr. Jacobs…."

Shortly after arresting your English teacher for sexual harassment and for teaching this version of _Hamlet_ in his class instead of the real one, I would reply, "…" because I'd be speechless.

After exiting the dining hall, Laertes and Captain Obvious walked to their family's private wing of the Hamlets' summer home, which had been generously donated to them by Claudius for the good captain's important work on the police force, for Laertes' effective kissing of asses, and, as you shall soon see, for Ophelia's general _sexiness_. I decided not to save a word in giving her description because some of us might need the additional help.

Laertes walked out to their wing's private swimming pool wearing nothing but his trunks for all you ladies out there. He saw his sister sitting at the edge of the pool in a blue bikini covered in white polka dots, moving her bare feet up and down, in and out of the water. The younger sibling was staring at her reflection, blue eyes and brown hair staring back at her from the chlorinated waves, in what was likely meant to be representative of the self-questioning she was going through, but since she's the only attractive young female in the cast, I think it's safe to say all we really care about is all the skin she was showing.

Ophelia's brother took a seat beside her and said, "My necessaries are embarked," in reference to the flight to Hamburg, Germany he'd just booked. "Farewell." And that was that. He got back up, patted her on the back, and began walking back inside. "_Oh,_" he said as he opened the door, turning around to look at Ophelia one last time. "And, sister, as the winds give benefit and convey is assistant, do not sleep, but let me hear from you?"

"Do you doubt that?" Ophelia asked.

Laertes glanced at her bosom with the kind of resistance to its beauty that only a blood relative could have. "For Hamlet," he said, "and the trifling of his favor, hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, a violet in the youth of primy nature, forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, the perfume and suppliance of a minute, no more."

Ophelia put a finger to her lip to contemplate his suggestion. "Okay, I'll marry him."

"_Think it no more,_" Laertes warned her. He ran back to her, kneeled down on one knee while putting a hand on her shoulder, and proceeded to give a long speech about all the faults of her relationship with our protagonist. Put succinctly, "Hamlet can't fulfill his promises, but he will fill that space between your legs."

"I shall the effect of this good lesson keep as watchman to my heart," she replied, placing her hand on her heart. "But, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads and recks not his own rede." She then punched him in the crotch and pushed him into the water.

"_O, fear me not_," Laertes said in a high-pitched whimper deserving of a hypocrite. He extended his hand out towards Ophelia for assistance in getting out safely, but she just kicked water in his face, and then grabbed a barrel of oil and threw it at him, whereupon she removed a match she just happened to have stored in her bikini top, set it on fire with her hotness, and was about to casually toss it into the black gooey mess spreading over her brother and the pool when Polonius ran up to her, slapped her on the ass, and snatched the match out of her grasp. "_A double blessing is double grace!_" Laertes cheered as Polonius waved his index finger indicating that what Ophelia had just done was a slight no-no. "_Occasion smiles upon a second leave!_" he continued as he swam onto dry land, relieved to have the chance to live another day.

"Yet here, Laertes?" Polonius said as he threw his son the nearest towel. "Aboard, aboard, for shame! The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail, and you are stayed for." Laertes vigorously scratched his pubic region with the towel, but it would do no good. "There, my blessing with thee. And these few precepts in thy memory look thou character." The fatherly advice was just getting started, but all Laertes could think about was getting back at his sister.

"Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act." Laertes began chasing Ophelia around the pool with a twisted wet towel, flinging it towards her like a whip, in a situation that, were he Hamlet instead, would probably just be brushed off as foreplay.

"Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar." This was when Laertes began shouting the insults."Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatched, unfledged courage." Laertes had caught up to Ophelia and grabbed the top of her bikini bottom, making her scream.

"Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, bear 't that th' opposed may beware of thee." In retaliation, Ophelia did a back flip and landed on Laertes' shoulders, her bikini bottom sliding off her body as she took flight. "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice." Laertes shouted for help as Ophelia grabbed his ears and pulled them back, stretching the cartilage inside to its limits. "Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment."

Realizing he had a weapon in the bikini bottom, Laertes threw it upward, and Ophelia jumped off of her brother in terror as the little piece of cloth landed on her head. "Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, but not expressed in fancy (rich, not gaudy), for the apparel oft proclaims the man, and they in France of the best rank and station are of a most select and generous chief in that." Laertes was now able to resume chasing Ophelia around the pool, though this time she was running blind, the bottom half of her attire now covering her eyes, making her kind of like Daredevil, if Daredevil were female, naked below the bosom, and somehow not keen to the concept that having something over your eyes does not in fact remove your ability to see.

"Neither a borrow nor a lender be," Polonius added, "for loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry." Ophelia crashed into a wall, and Laertes took advantage of his sister's flailing on the ground to remove the bikini bottom from her head, hand it to her, and then punch her in the face. "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Ophelia repositioned herself so she was right side up, slid her bikini bottom back up her legs, then shook Laertes' hand and pulled him in for a hug. "Farewell," Polonius finished. "My blessing season this in thee."

"Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord," Laertes said tearfully.

"The time invests you," Polonius said, helping both of his grown children up off the ground. "Go, your servants tend," he said to Laertes.

"Farewell, Ophelia," Laertes said, giving her another hug, "and remember well what I have said to you."

"'Tis in my memory locked," Ophelia nodded, "and you yourself shall keep the key of it."

"Farewell," Laertes said, running away and out of sight, leaving Polonius to dispense some fatherly advice on Ophelia this time. "What is 't, Ophelia, he hath said to you?"

"So please," Ophelia said with a bow, "something touching the Lord Hamlet."

"Marry, well bethought."

"Okay, I'll marry him."

"No," Polonius said, tsk-tsking. "'Tis told me he hath very oft of late given private time to you, and you yourself have of your audience been most free and bounteous. If it be so (as so 'tis put on me, and that in way of caution), I must tell you you do not understand yourself so clearly as it behooves my daughter and your honor. What is between you? Give me up the truth."

"He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders of his affection to me."

"Affection, _puh!_" Polonius said, slapping Ophelia on her bottom again. "You speak like a green girl unsifted in such perilous circumstance. Do you believe his 'tenders,' as you call them?"

"I do not know," Ophelia shrugged, "my lord, what I should think."

"Marry, I will teach you."

"Okay, I'll marry him," Ophelia repeated.

"_No,_" Polonius said. "Think yourself a baby that you have ta'en these tenders for true pay, which are not sterling." Yup, nothing like telling your baby girl to think of herself as a prostitute to set her on the right track. "Tender yourself more dearly, or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase, running it thus) you'll tender me a fool."

"My lord, he hath importuned me with love in honorable fashion—"

"Ay, 'fashion' you may call it. Go to, go to!"

"And hath given me consonants to his speech, my lord, with almost all the holy cows of heaven." As you might be suspecting, Ophelia hadn't been reading the right draft of the play this morning.

"Ay, springes to catch woodcocks." A woodcock is a type of forest-dwelling sandpiper thought to be stupid and thus easily caught in snares by hunters, but who cares—he just said _cock_! "I do know, when the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows. These blazes, daughter, giving more light than heat, extinct in both even in their promise as it is a-making, you must not take for fire. From this time be something scanter of your maiden presence. Set your entreatments at a higher rate than a command to parle. For Lord Hamlet, believe so much in him that he is young, and with a larger tether may he walk than may be given you. In few, Ophelia, do not believe his vows, for they are brokers, not of that dye which their investments show, but mere implorators of unholy suits, breathing like sanctified and pious bawds the better to beguile. This is for all: I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth have you so slander any moment leisure as to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet. Look to 't, I charge you. Come your ways."

"I shall obey, my lord." She then ran off to go have sex with Hamlet.


	4. Act 1, Scene 4

"The air bites shrewdly," Hamlet said, shivering as he, Marcellus and I exited the same private plane the latter two among us had taken to the Bahamas. "It is very cold," he observed, though he only meant it in comparison to the warmth of his mother's touch.

"It is a nipping and eager air," I said.

"What hour now?"

"I think it lacks of twelve."

"No," Marcellus said as his Great Dane began to tug on his shirt in fear. "It is struck."

"Indeed, I heard it not," I quickly changed my tune, because if I were ever wrong the universe would surely implode. "It then draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk." Suddenly, before I could go on about things you already know, a ridiculously loud explosion, accompanied by a mushroom cloud and a blinding light that briefly turned this night to day, and uproarious cheering from the islanders, interrupted me. The three of us looked to the east to see what had been the cause for this admittedly rather low-key celebration—as a cop, I'd seen teens pull off worse. I put my sunglasses back on to defend my eyes from the blast. "What does this mean, my lord?" I asked, offended that I wasn't omniscient.

"The king doth wake tonight and takes his rouse," Hamlet answered, "keeps wassail, and the swagg'ring uprising; and, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, the kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out the triumph of his pledge." Okay, just another drunk politician with his hands on the launch codes, nothing to see here.

"Is it a custom?" I asked, taking my glasses back off and, whilst looking at my reflection in them, wondering why my narration was seemingly not consistent with my dialogue.

"Ay, marry, is 't, but, to my mind, though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance. This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations." Well, yeah, your uncle just dropped a nuke on the Bahamas, dude. "They clepe us drunkards and with Bahamian phrase soil our addition. And indeed, it takes from our achievements, though performed at height, the pith and marrow of our attribute. So oft it chances in particular men that for some vicious mole of nature in them, as in their birth (wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin), by the o'ergrowth some complexion (oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason) or by some habit that too much o'erleavens the form of plausive manners—that these men, carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, being nature's livery or fortune's star, his virtues else, be they as pure as grace, as infinite as men may undergo, shall in the general censure take corruption from that particular fault. The dram of evil doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal."

I slapped Hamlet on the back of the head, partly because his speech had gone on _way_ too long, but mostly because the ghost of his father had arrived, and we hadn't even left the airport yet. The people in the terminal around us marveled at the specter's amazing ability to get past security without having its naughty bits x-rated and e-mailed between perverted TSA employees.

"_Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!_" Hamlet gasped, falling to his knees before the ghost. "Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou com'st in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee." He cleared his throat, and I put my sunglasses back on. "I'll call thee 'Hamlet,' 'King,' 'Father,' 'Royal Dude.' O, answer me!" The ghost pretended to ignore Hamlet, because it was kind of a dick. "Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher, wherein we saw thee quietly interred, hath opened his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again." Hamlet pretended to cry, because—no, wait, those tears were real, and if the laughter of everyone else in the airport was any indication, they were hilarious. Marcellus and I joined in the laughing, and so did Marcellus's dog, though the canine may have simply been high. "What may this mean that thou, dead corse, again in complete steel, revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous, and we fools of nature so horridly to shake our disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?"

"Like," Marcellus said, "that was deep, man."

"_Say, why is this?_" Hamlet begged of his undead father. "Wherefore? What should we do?"

The ghost beckoned Hamlet to go away with it as if some impartment did desire to him alone. Now imagine that sentence in quotation marks with a dialogue tag, because I totally said that, yo.

"Like, look with what courteous action it waves you to a more removed ground," Marcellus said, watching as the ghost tempted Hamlet to follow him with a trail of candy on the ground that much to the deceased king's frustration was being consumed by Scooby instead. "But do not go with it," Marcellus said, grabbing his dog's tail.

"No, by no means," I repeated, taking my sunglasses back off.

"It will not speak," Hamlet said, his gaze fixated on the plastic-wrapped sweets lying dirty on the floor like a bunch of tiny edible prostitutes. "Then I will follow it."

"Do not, my lord."

"Why, what should be the fear?" Hamlet said with a shrug. "I do not set my life at a pin's fee. And for my soul, what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? It waves me forth again." Indeed the ghost did, this time actively throwing the candies at Hamlet's head. Catching a piece in his mouth and swallowing it whole, Hamlet said, "I'll follow it," with a smile.

"What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?" I asked. "Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea, and there assume some other horrible form which might deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?" Of course, you probably know Hamlet is going to be drawn into madness anyway, because his girlfriend personifies madness and Hamlet sticks his man parts inside her. I put my sunglasses back on and continued, "Think of it. The very place puts toys of desperation, without more motive, into every brain that looks so many fathoms to the sea and hears it roar beneath."

"It waves me still," Hamlet said, reaching for the first of the bite-sized bombs of fat while his father's ghost nodded and smiled. "Go on, I'll follow thee."

"Like, you shall not go, my lord," Marcellus said, as he, his dog and I each grabbed Hamlet in an area of his body least likely to make us look like depraved homosexuals. Some of us failed at this, but to protect the innocent (Marcellus), I won't get any more specific than that.

"Hold off your hands," Hamlet said, slipping out of our grip gracefully.

"Be ruled," I said. "You shall not go."

"My fate cries out and makes each petty arture in this body as hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. Still am I called. Unhand me, gentlemen, by heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!" We let go, but as soon as we did, the ghost immediately grabbed Hamlet, but since he couldn't be made a ghost _again_, Hamlet could only whine at the unfairness of it all. "I say, away!" he repeated to us, before looking to his spiritual father and saying, "Go on, I'll follow thee." With exposition no longer holding them back, the two of them left, but not before Hamlet somehow became unlucky enough to be screened by the TSA on the way _out_ of the airport. I couldn't wait to check my e-mail when I got home.

"He waxes desperate with imagination," I said, taking my sunglasses off.

"Let's follow," Marcellus said with a shrug. "Like, 'tis not fit thus to obey him."

"Have after," I nodded. "To what issue will this come?"

"Something is rotten in the state of Florida." Truer words were never spoken, and Marcellus was rightfully greeted with applause for his utterance of this phrase.

"Heaven will direct it."

"Nay, let's follow him."

For the final time in this chapter, I put my sunglasses back on, and then Marcellus and I hurried to my Hummer, blasted on the speed metal, and picked up some chicks at the club while we stealthily followed Hamlet and ghost Hamlet.


	5. Act 1, Scene 5

"Whither wilt thou lead me?" Hamlet asked, as the ghost of his father led him through a thick patch of rose bushes en route to the cemetery. "Speak," he said with a sudden stop, as his crotch could endure the thorniness no more. "I'll go no further."

"Mark me," the ghost said, its attempt to kick him in the balls for being a whiner nullified by a combination of roses having already done the job and his being a ghost and thus incorporeal. Nevertheless, he did it anyway, and because this is Hamlet, it worked.

"_I will_," Hamlet whined some more.

"My hour is almost come when I to sulf'rous and tormenting flames must render up myself," the ghost began to explain.

"Alas, poor ghost!" Hamlet said.

"Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold."

"Speak. I am bound to hear."

"So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear."

"What?"

"I am thy father's spirit—"

"_NOOOOOOOOOO!_" Hamlet cried. "_That's not true! That's IMPOSSIBLE!_"

"…Doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away." Having finished the sentence that had been oh so rudely interrupted, he was now able to scold the boy for said interruption. To do so, the king led a still-groin-aching Hamlet to his gravestone, whereupon the still-living prince fell to his knees in tears—manly tears of a man, mind you, not sissy tears of a Spacek. "But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house," the ghost continued, "I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand an end, like quills upon the fearful porpentine." To demonstrate, the ghost used his powers to summon a porcupine, correctly spelled and regrettably living in Florida with the rest of these characters, and had said porcupine scare Hamlet with a rendition of Rebecca Black's "Friday," only with more AutoTuning and less talent because, dude, it's a fracking porcupine. As the porcupine took a bow and millions of hits on YouTube, the ghost finished, "But this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood."

"Too late for that," Hamlet said, covering his ears and cursing God that it was Friday. Yeah, screw you, ABC.

"_List, list, O list!_" the ghost moaned, and Hamlet struggled to find a pen and paper, instead settling on a gravestone and a twig. He readied the gravestone to inscribe something on that twig. "If thou didst ever thy dear father love—"

"_O God!_" Hamlet gasped. This was going to be a grocery list to remember.

"Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder."

Hamlet began pounding letters of the alphabet onto the twig with his randomly chosen gravestone. Echoing his late father, he repeated, "Revenge his foul and most unnatural…murder?" He looked back up at the ghost. "_Murder?_"

"Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange and unnatural."

"Haste me to know 't, that I, with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love, may sweep to…hey, my twig broke."

"I find thee apt."

"Really?"

"No, you suck as a son. And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed that roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, wouldst thou not stir in this."

"What must I do, father?"

"Now, Hamlet, hear. 'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, a serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Dade County is by a forged process of my death rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father's life now wears his crown."

"O, my prophetic soul!" Hamlet gasped, because apparently he'd never watched _The Lion King_ as a kid. "My uncle!"

The ghost nodded. "Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts—o wicked wit and gifts, that have the power so to seduce!—won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen. O, Hamlet, what a falling off was there!" In Gertrude's defense though, something with actual blood flow is sure to be a better lover than a corpse or a ghost or a son. "From me, whose love was of that dignity that it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage, and to decline upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor to those of mine." Just because your brother murdered you, it doesn't necessarily mean you're better than him. That's just being arrogant is what it is. Honestly, no wonder he killed you. "But virtue, as it will never be moved, though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, so, lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage. But soft," the ghost said, "methinks I smell the morning air. Brief let me be." Hamlet was an idiot, so he didn't let the ghost be brief, and the speech that that followed in fact took up another thirty-two lines that for posterity's sake are not going to be reprinted and made fun of in my commentary. "Remember me," the ghost said before disappearing with the night and sunrise enveloped the land.

"O all you host of heaven!" Hamlet said, making a fist and kicking the dirt with it. Yes, he kicked with his arm. "O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell? O fie! Hold, hold, my heart, and you, my sinews, grow not instant old, but bear me stiffly up." He looked skyward, hoping his father's face would appear in the clouds and talk to him in some sort of bizarre weather occurrence that would admittedly be less bizarre than elsewhere because this is Florida. "Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat in this distracted globe." He immediately forgot what he was talking about and banded about a bunch of random insults, all poorly constructed, both grammatically and logically, because he was an easily distracted emo teen who had no sense of responsibility in all this. "My tables," he said eventually, referring to outdated Renaissance writing materials in an attempt to be cool, "meet it as I set it down that one may smile and smile and be a villain." Somewhere, Claudius was smiling, because he was banging Gertrude there. "At least I am sure it may be so in Dade County." Rather than give the aforementioned table to a dedicated historical society or acknowledge what limited continuity there was here by writing with a stick and a tombstone, Hamlet wrote down what he'd been told: "So, uncle, there you are," he said while drawing a crude picture of Claudius that more closely resembled boobs. "Now to my word. It is '_adieu_, _adieu_, remember me.' I have sworn 't."

That's when Marcellus and I arrived, our _mother-effin' Humvee_ crashing through the "Cemetery Gates" recording session by Pantera and into the graveyard, our vehicle nearly hitting Hamlet at full speed and only stopping because we shouldn't make jokes about Dimebag Darrel dying like that. "_My lord, my lord!_" I said as I hopped out of the driver's seat and out of my sunglasses.

"_Like, Lord Hamlet!_" Marcellus said.

"_Heavens, secure him!_" I ordered my partner. During the previous night's last club hopping, I'd nicknamed Marcellus "Heavens" because alcohol does strange things to you.

"So be it," Hamlet said, offering his hands to be arrested and taking away all the fun for us. Marcellus then made sounds like a chicken, and _sexy _Romeo stepped in during a break from production of his story to utter a fantastic slur at the man that Hamlet was quick to join in, and only I could put an end to by threatening to put my glasses back and take them back off again. Fearing an awful pun, Romeo left.

"What news, my lord?" I asked when normality had returned.

"O, _wonderful_!" Hamlet said, sarcasm being the height of his sense of humor.

"Good my lord," I said, "tell it."

"_No_," Hamlet whined, "you will reveal it."

"Not I, my lord, by heaven."

"Like, nor I, my lord," Marcellus nodded.

"How say you, then?" Hamlet said. "Would heart of man once think it? But you'll be secret?" We nodded and behind our backs, did a secret handshake to go public with what we were about to learn when it would be most embarrassing to those involved. "There's never a villain dwelling in all Dade County but he's an arrant knave."

Since we were cops, we already knew all the most horrible things that went down in Miami, like drug deals, murders, and the elderly moving in up from up north. "There needs no ghost," I said, putting my sunglasses back on, "my lord, come from the grave to tell us this."

"Why, right you are in the right." I looked right, and so did Marcellus, where we saw nothing but our right sides. "And so, without more circumstance at all, I hold it fit that we shake hands and part, you, as your business and desire shall point you (for every man hath business and desire, such as it is), and for my own poor part, I will go pray."

"These are but wild and whirling words, my lord," I said, though hurricane season was probably to blame for their erratic movements about our sentences.

"I am sorry they offend you, heartily; yes, faith, heartily."

"There's no offense, my lord." What I meant was, "I'm going to plant evidence pinning you to a hilarious misdemeanor for that," but dramatic irony wouldn't let me say so directly.

"Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio, and much offense, too."

I turned to Marcellus and whispered, "_Shit, he's onto us_."

"Touching this vision here, it is an honest ghost—that let me tell you."

"Okay." So we did.

"For your desire to know what it is between us, o'ermaster 't as you may. And now, good friends, as you are friends, scholars and soldiers, give me one poor request."

"What?"

"Never make known what you have seen tonight."

"My lord," I laughed, removing my sunglasses again, "we will not."

"Nay, but swear 't." He extended his fist too slowly to punch us, and it took Marcellus and I a moment to realize the man was attempting to get us to do the same.

"In faith, my lord, not I," I shrugged as he and I bumped fists.

"Like, nor I, my lord, in faith," Marcellus added, repeating what I had done.

"_Yeah!_" a still intoxicated Scooby said, following his master in the fist-bumping with Hamlet. "_Rell ro rone!_"

"_Upon my sword!_" Hamlet shouted, scaring the dog both with the volume of his voice and the blade he nearly cut its paw off with in a sudden drawing of the weapon. He pointed the sword at Marcellus and I.

"_Like, we have sworn already, man!_" Marcellus whimpered as urine dribbled down his pants like a tiny sweaty Asian basketball player.

"Indeed, upon my sword, indeed," Hamlet said, pointing the tip of his sword at the tip of Marcellus's.

"_Swear!_" A deep voice from beneath the ground added strength to Hamlet's nutcase. I mean the argument for his insanity, not his…well, I suppose to be fair, we shouldn't rule out the other option. After all, it's easy to see how having Darth Vader's voice lending credence to one's testicles could increase one's chance of becoming two.

In accordance with the dead king's wishes, Marcellus uttered a word you'd never hear on Saturday morning cartoons, and Hamlet nodded and aimed the sword at me.

"You know I have a _gun_, right?" I said as I lifted my hands and put them behind my head.

"Ha, ha, boy, sayst thou so?"

I looked to the gun holstered at my hip. "_Yeah_."

"Art thou there, truepenny?" Hamlet said, pressing the blade against my neck with one hand while reaching to remove my weapon with the other. Because I'm a cop, there was a complicated procedure only I and other officers knew to pull the gun out of the holster, but because I was a cop on TV, the most complicated that procedure got was "lift," and that's exactly what Hamlet did.

I sighed as Hamlet threw his sword to the ground and adopted the gun as his new object to threaten us with. "Safety's on," I remarked with a yawn.

"Like, why are you _telling_ him this?" Marcellus cried, now standing in a puddle of yellow liquid that would eventually seep into someone's corpse in the ground below and cause a really bad day in the afterlife for them.

"Come on," Hamlet said after turning the safety off and pointing my own weapon at me, like a lot of great heroes have done to their friends. "You hear this fellow in the cellarage. Say something, dad."

"_This is CNN._"

"Consent to swear," the son said with the gun pressed against my forehead.

"Propose the oath, my lord," I shrugged.

"Never to speak of this that you have seen, swear by my sword."

"Gun."

"Gun."

"_Swear_," the ghost of the king said, the ground rumbling faintly with his every word, which was only one so it wasn't such a big deal.

"_Hic et ubique?_" Hamlet said, his gratuitous Latin doing nothing but causing more mental strain on the reader. "Then we'll shift our ground. Come hither, gentlemen, and lay your hands again upon my sword. Swear by my sword never to speak of this that you have heard."

"_Swear by his sword!_"

"Well said, old mole," Hamlet said, and in response, the ghost summoned a literal mole to appear before us, which we knew was doing his bidding because it was wearing a crown atop its head engraved with the uninspired phrasing of "King Hamlet's Mole." "Canst work i' th' earth so fast? A worthy pioneer! Once more remove, good friends."

"O day and night," I said, "but this is wondrous strange."

"And therefore as a stranger give it welcome," Hamlet said. Rather than actually fire the weapon he was poised to kill me with and spare the reader further reminders of my back-and-forth sunglasses routine, he, being Hamlet, continued to gloat instead. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come."

"Not without a lady friend, I'm afraid."

"The man has a _gun_ to your head, Horatio!" Marcellus said. "Do what he says!"

"Here," Hamlet said, "as before, never, so help you mercy, how strange or odd some'er I bear myself (as I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put an antic disposition on)," basically admitting to us that much craziness was to follow, "that you, at such times seeing me, never shall, with arms encumbered thus, or this headshake, or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase," for which he gave some examples of the suggested ambiguity, "or such ambiguous giving-out, to note that you know aught of me—this do swear, so grace and mercy at your most need help you."

"_Swear!_" the mole roared.

I nodded and extended one hand towards Hamlet. "It's a deal." He smiled and lowered the hand holding the gun, handing it back to me so he could properly shake with the hand I was offering. But I didn't give him the chance, choosing instead to fire a round through his cheek. A deafening scream awoke everyone in Miami who wasn't already awake, but fortunately, this meant they would all get to work on time for once, especially the idiot who was up all night seeking the ghost of his late father and got shot in the face for his trouble.

"_Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!_" the Hamlet with a bloody hole in his jaw desperately requested of the Hamlet possessing the body of a blind subterranean insectivore. I saw to it that Hamlet's wish was fulfilled, as karma for shooting him in the face, by shooting the mole dead with a pair of well-aimed gunshots at its chest.

"It's okay," I said, patting Hamlet on the back (making blood spurt out) and handing him a tissue to cover up that unsightly gap in his head. While walking up to the mole and snatching the crown off its head for sale at a pawn shop later, I continued, "He's supposed to be underground anyway."

"So, gentlemen," Hamlet said with the tissue pasted on his face like some kind of insane shaving accident, "with all my love I do commend me to you, and what so poor a man as Hamlet is may do t' express his love and friending to you, god willing, shall not lack." Marcellus and I helped the limping young prince to our _mother-effin' Humvee_, though not before he tripped into the puddle Marcellus had made, thereby mixing the red fluid with the yellow to create an orange that matched the hot Miami sun. And then Hamlet accidentally sat on Scooby's tail upon entering the back seat, which caused the dog to bark loudly and made Hamlet hit his head on the roof of the vehicle and steadily fall unconscious from that and the blood loss that ruined his day but not that of the car washer we'd visit after dropping Hamlet off at the palace. "Let us go in together," the woozy man said, "and still your fingers on your lips, I pray." He vomited some. "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!" He leaned forward, putting one hand each on myself in the driver's seat and Marcellus in the passenger. "Nay, come, let's go together."

And then he fell face first onto the clutch, sending us in reverse. As you shall soon see, this is how the story went from bad to worse.


	6. Act 2, Scene 1

Captain Obvious handed his _sexy_ servant Reynaldo an envelope as the two of them walked through the halls of their wing of the Hamlet mansion, probably with lack of any real direction due to the old man's impending senility. "Give him this money and these notes, Reynaldo," Polonius told the man.

"I will, my lord," Reynaldo nodded, stuffing the envelope into his pants as though it were drugs.

"You shall do marvelous wisely, good Reynaldo, before you visit him, to make inquire of his behavior."

"My lord, I did intend it."

"Marry, well said, very well said."

"Okay, I'll marry him."

They both shared a laugh at this, but stopped when they realized they were making light of a real world civil rights struggle, but then started up again when they remembered this wasn't the real world.

"Look you, sir," Polonius continued, "inquire me first what Dade County citizens are in Paris; and how, and who, what means, and where they keep, what company, at what expense; and finding by this encompassment and drift of question that they do know my son, come you more nearer than your particular demands will touch it." This was a long-winded way of saying he wanted Reynaldo to find local Floridians in Paris and ask them about Laertes' progress at the university, because asking native Parisians about that or anything else would inevitably result in sex. "Take you, as 'twere, some distant knowledge of him, as thus: 'I know his father and his friends and, in part, him.' Do you mark this, Reynaldo?"

Reynaldo nodded again. "Ay, very well, my lord."

" 'And in part, him, but,' you may say, 'not well. But if 't be he I mean, he's very wild, addicted so and so.' And there put on him what forgeries you please—marry, none so rank as may dishonor him, take heed of that, but, sir, such wanton, wild and unusual slips as are companions noted and most known to youth and liberty."

"As gaming, my lord."

"Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing, quarreling, drabbing—you may go so far."

"My lord, that would dishonor him."

"Faith, no," Polonius said, shaking his head in disappointment at the rogue slayer he'd seen on TV back in 1999, which Reynaldo wasn't, "as you may season it in the charge. You must not put another scandal on him that is open to incontinency; that's not my meaning."

"So, you _don't_ want me to have gay sex with him?"

"No, Reynaldo, that would be a scandal. But breathe his faults so quaintly that they may seem the taints of liberty, the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, a savageness in unreclaimed blood, of general assault."

"But, my good lord—"

"Wherefore should you do this?"

Reynaldo hadn't anticipated a pop quiz. He bit his lip as Polonius handed him a slip of paper and a dinky number 2 pencil. "Ay, my lord, I should know that," the servant admitted with a sigh a minute later.

Polonius snatched the paper from Reynaldo and crumbled it into a ball, which he then threw at the younger man's dog, a white Pomeranian that ran away whimpering. "_You fail!_" he barked at an ashamed Reynaldo.

"How much, sir?"

"I will take a snapshot of this moment," Polonius explained as another servant, a _sexy_ man Reynaldo would remember to remove from his friends list on Facebook later that night, did just that with a digital camera, "upload it to the Internet and label it epic!" He looked to the other servant, shook his hand, and said, "Thanks, Bob," with a smile and a shake of his hand before returning his gaze to Reynaldo with disappointment. Even Faith could've passed that quiz, and she was evil.

"No, my lord, anything but that!"

"Marry, sir, here's my drift, and I believe it is a fetch of wit." He sighed and prepared to drop some much-needed knowledge on Reynaldo. "You, laying these slight sullies on my son, as 'twere a thing a little soiled i' th' working, mark you, your party in converse, him you would sound, having ever seen in the prenominate crimes the youth you breathe of guilty, be assured he closes with you in this consequence: 'good sir,' or so, or 'friend,' or 'gentleman,' according to the phrase or the addition of man and country—"

"Very good, my lord," Reynaldo interrupted the sentence, which was starting to run longer than a Kenyan in an Olympic marathon. The race is over, guys, you can stop now. This isn't _Forrest Gump_.

"And then, sir, does he this, he does—what was I about to say? By the Mass, I was about to say something. Where did I leave?"

Reynaldo saw an opportunity and was quick to exploit it. "You were about to tell me how well I did on that pop quiz you gave me. And you were going to fire Bob."

"But I like Bob."

"No, you don't."

"Since when?"

"Since now."

"That makes sense." Polonius pulled out his cell phone and dialed Bob. "Hi, Bob. …What? You just uploaded that photo of Reynaldo failing the pop quiz to Failblog?"

"_No!_" Reynaldo said. "You mustn't believe him, sir! He's…he's smoking that weed!"

"Bob, are you smoking that weed? …He says he isn't, Reynaldo."

"That's because he's a liar!"

"Are you a liar, Bob? …He says he isn't, Reynaldo."

"That's because he's a liar!"

This back-and-forth continued for several minutes until the situation resolved itself, meaning, Bob got fired, Reynaldo got exposed as a liar and failed his quiz, and Polonius was reminded of what he had actually been about to say. "At 'closes in the consequence'—ay, marry—he closes thus: 'I know the gentleman. I saw him yesterday,' or 'th' other day' (or then, or then, with such or such), 'and as you say, there was he gaming, there o'ertook in 's rouse, there falling out at tennis'; or perchance 'I saw him enter such a house of sale'—_videlicet_, a brothel—or so forth. See you now your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth; and thus do we of wisdom and of reach, with windlasses and with assays of bias, by indirections find directions out. So by my former lecture and advice shall you my son. You have me, have you not?"

"My lord, I have," Reynaldo said.

"God be wi' you. Fare you well."

"Good my lord."

"Observe his inclination in yourself."

"I shall, my lord."

"And let him ply his music."

"Well, my lord."

"Farewell."

Reynaldo left just as Ophelia was entering, in tears. The ambiguous syntax of the previous sentence was ruined when Polonius asked his daughter what was wrong.

"How now, Ophelia, what's the matter?"

See? That jerk.

"O, my lord," she wept into her father's shirt, "my lord, I have been so affrighted!"

"With what, i' the name of God?"

"My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, no hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, ungartered and down-gyved to his ankle, pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, and with a look so piteous in purport as if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors—he comes before me."

Ophelia lifted her head to look up at Captain Obvious, awaiting some fatherly advice that, unlike Hamlet when in her presence, would never come. Let's see Polonius ruin the syntax of that sentence without looking like a child molester.

Not wanting to harm an innocent sentence like he had before, Polonius sighed, shook his head, and gently pushed Ophelia away while handing her a handkerchief. "Mad for thy love?" he asked.

"My lord, I do not know, but truly I do fear it."

"What said he?"

"He took me by the wrist and held me hard." This was the equivalent of Hamlet's hand cursing up a storm, which cannot be reprinted here but can have its effect replicated if you take your computer outside to read this in the rain. Polonius gasped at Hamlet's actions, but the shock lessened when he remembered that they lived in hurricane country. Those expecting a dozen or so lines of outdated English to follow this were also reminded of what kind of story they were reading when Ophelia ended abruptly, "And then he sang to me."

"What did he sing?"

"Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang," Ophelia said, with neither the nasally voice nor the catchy beat that was necessary to give the Chipmunks their due respect.

"_Sing it right!_" a distant voice shouted in their direction, this request immediately followed by the sounds of shotgun fire and a woman screaming.

"Perhaps you should do as the nice man says, Ophelia."

"No," Ophelia shook her head.

They heard another warning shotgun blast be fired into the air, and immediately afterward, a whimpering puppy.

"Think of the puppy," Polonius urged her, putting his hand on her arm.

"I'm really more of a cat person."

"You bitch."

"No, that would be the puppy of whom you speak."

"_Are we doing this?_" the man with the shotgun shouted.

"Come go with me," Polonius said, taking Ophelia, but not in an incestuous way because they weren't Hamlets, and if they were, he'd at least wait until his daughter had married into the family before doing such a thing. "I will go seek the King." Ostensibly he was going to do something about Ophelia's refusal to help out a little puppy, or perhaps demand that shotgun-wielding Chipmunks fans were taken off the streets, maybe even both, but his concern for Hamlet was foremost. "This is the very ecstasy of love, whose violent property fordoes itself and leads the will to desperate undertakings as oft the passions under heaven that does afflict our natures. I am sorry. What, have you given him any hard words of late?"

"No, my good lord," Ophelia answered, stepping out of her father's grasp but continuing to walk alongside him, "but as you did commend I did repel his letters and deny his access to me."

"Good, very good."

"I'm just kidding," Ophelia laughed. "We've been having lots of sex."

"That hath made him mad." Polonius sighed. "I am sorry that with better heed and judgment I had not coted him. I feared he did but trifle and meant to wrack thee."

"Don't feel bad, father," she said, her turn to put a hand on his arm.

"_But beshrew my jealousy!_"

"Oh. It's like _that_." She backed away slowly. "You should've called dibs first! I would've _respected_ that!" Having misinterpreted the language as younger generations often do, she then ran off to have sex with Hamlet, this time to solidify her dibs. And you always respect the dibs.

"By heaven," Polonius grumbled, "it is proper to our age to cast beyond ourselves in our opinions as it is common for the younger sort to lack discretion." Unfortunately, this knowledge of good parenting skills was pointless if he didn't put it to use, which, in case you didn't read that last paragraph, he didn't. "Come, go we—" he said, turning to the daughter he'd forgotten had left, "…_I_ to the King. This must be known, which, being kept close, might move more grief to hide than hate to utter love. Come." He pretended Ophelia was at his side, so convincingly that a servant that passed them by tried to make a pass at her and was fired for it. Once that matter was settled, it was off to see Claudius.


End file.
